Friday, November 10, 2017

Think
Progress’s “analysis” (being repeated everywhere now) of Roy Moore’s dissent in
Higdon v. State
is so egregiously FALSE that my heart was racing in indignation over it for at
least a few minutes. For the record, I’m a moderate liberal Democrat who detests
the politics of personal destruction, and am increasingly alarmed by other common
features of contemporary public political discourse that are actively shredding
the fabric of American society, destroying too many of us “regular” folks’
filial, family, and community bonds in process.

I have to get to my paying job soon, so I’m just going to throw down a quick
and dirty critique for now. Hopefully I’ll motivate to flesh it out later (we’ll
see.)

Higdon v State, the case ThinkProgress
referred to, was an appeal involving charges of:
(1) 1st degree sodomy of a kid <12, AND
(2) 1st degree sodomy by forcible compulsion
These charges arose from incidents involving a 17 year old (minor) perpetrator
& one child victim (BTW, ThinkProgress, the child victim was 4, not 12, as
you “reported.”) Juvenile perpetrator Higdon
was convicted on BOTH counts. He appealed both convictions to the State Court
of Appeals. (For readers less familiar with legal and judicial process and
systems, since Lord knows I didn’t learn this stuff until law school, that’s the
intermediate
court between the trial court level and the State Supreme Court.)

On review, the State Court of Appeals UPHELD the conviction as to Charge 1. So
that felony conviction stood. But they overturned the conviction on Charge 2
based on a 2002 State Supreme Court decision in a case called “Ex
Parte J.A.P.” (initials used there as Defendant was also a minor child.)
That case established precedent that limited the scope of what's defined as
"forcible" compulsion when the perpetrator is also a juvenile.

The State appealed the Court of Appeals decision as to Charge
2. Higdon did not appeal the decision as to Charge 1 (1st degree sodomy of kid
<12), so that conviction stood. In other
words, regardless of what the State Supreme Court decided on appeal, the juvie
perp was STILL going to be a felon & likely a lifelong registered sex
offender due to their abuse of the victim.

So the Supreme Court overruled the Court of Appeals on the legal
applicability of Charge 2, overruling Ex Parte
JAP. JusticeMoore *concurred* (AGREED WITH) that interpretation and result. He dissented on a more narrow point of law,
which I don’t have time to get into.

So here’s the WORST irony of all. You know that Ex Parte JAP case? Guess which
Court of Appeals Judge wrote that 2001 opinion finding that a minor can engage in forcible compulsion
through an implied threat? A view the 2002 Alabama Supreme Court rejected, but
came around to in 2015 with the Higdon decision?

ROY MOORE. Yep. THAT Roy Moore. Then-Court of Appeals
Judge Roy Moore was right on that matter
of law at least 13 years before the State Supreme Court “got it.”

Again,
read the decision & dissent for yourself here. Roy
Moore’s dissent even mentions that he authored the 2001 Court of Appeals
decision in J.A.P. and discusses how
it aligns with Alabama Supreme Court’s reasoning in ruling on Higdon.

I'm sick of political
spinmeisters and their evil BS smears. Enough already.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Need of a Creative Commons pic to head this piecelead me to discover this nugget here and here:

The person who is allegedly Assange is referring to a version of this public domain photo, which had been cropped into a head shot by other Creative Commons contributors:

Oh, my. It's unclear how this December 2009 photo "undermines his message." Is his expression not dour and serious enough? Does he fail to evoke James Bond to the extent he wishes to? I wondered.

Color me disappointed. Apparently, he believed this poorly lit wind-swept outdoor pic was a depiction more "suitable to [his] public role."

If this request actually came from Assange, it simply underlines just how much his efforts are driven by a huge ego and thirst for fame, rather than anything remotely resembling altruistic intent. If it didn't come from him, one wonders how it's managed to remain up on Wikipedia, attributed as his direct contribution, for more than six years now.

So much for that Wikileaks "October Surprise that's going to DESTROY Hillary!" in the wee hours of this morning. You can almost hear Fox News' collective heart breaking in this story:

I stayed up for quite a bit to watch Julian Assange's middle of the night (US time) Berlin press conference, but I finally went to sleep because they kept pushing his start time back. I'm now annoyed that I stayed up until 1:30 am Pacific Time, listening to/watching Alex freakin' Jones (does that man ever NOT yell??) live stream over this. =PSo, after a much needed night's rest, I just listened to Assange's remarks at the event and his Q&A portion. His remarks were basically uninspiring calls for "a worldwide army of defenders" (folks were encouraged to follow a couple of new Wikileaks-associated Twitter accounts), and for much, much more grassroots financial support (with touting of a donation site), and an announcement that they're developing some sort of voting membership organizational model. He also:1. disputed the notion that he has an axe to grind with Hillary specifically (interesting, since he's circulated this story that she said in a security meeting, "Can't we just drone him?" and since all of their US Election releases to date have been targeted exclusively at the Democratic side of the ledger)

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

I spent some quality time with this fine tool, along with a variety of wonderful, absolutely tremendous, honest-to-God Trump quotes*, and came up with an array of options with which to bedeck one's automobile, laptop, fridge, cubicle or home office bulletin board, dorm room door, or what have you.

Regrettably, some of Trump's finest work defies attempts to be boilt down into a slogan. Efforts will continue to force these more unwieldy expressions of wisdom into 52 characters or less.

Please enjoy - and feel free to share your own masterpieces in the Comments section!

*Note - due to the 52 character space constraint, some quotes have been modified in ways that do not distort their meaning. For example, names of individuals he was referring to have been included (China) or substituted for pronouns (eg "Ivanka" for "her") or left out if it made the slogan too long (e.g., "Lyin' Ted.") But now - onto the bumper sticker mock-ups! I'd love to see Dick Morris come up with beauts like these ...

Not yet clear - who pulled the auction? Did George Zimmerman have sudden, simultaneous bouts of common sense and decency (an exceedingly unlikely convergence of events, if ever there were one)? Or did gunbroker.com get a heap of backlash and decide that proceeding with the auction was unseemly and/or bad business? My odds are 10:1 on the latter. And I'd be willing to bet that no small measure of the backlash came from pro-Second Amendment champions. At least, I sincerely hope that's the case.

Friday, March 18, 2016

You can’t possibly be serious about nominating Donald Trump for President.I know plenty of you are (reasonably) fed up
with politicians who say one thing then do another.But this man is a compulsive
liar.One analysis found that he
lies, on average, once every five minutes.He lies so much, journalists
say they can’t even keep up with fact-checking it all.His positions on major issues shift right
along with his ever-changing moods.Trump
is quite possibly the least predictable
Presidential candidate we’ve ever seen. His
word is infinitely less reliable
than what comes from the many other politicians who’ve disappointed you so much.“But,”
I can hear you saying, “But he’s a successful businessman! And a tough guy! And super smart! He tells it like it is!He cares about working folks and putting a
stop to illegal immigration!He knows
how to hire the best people! He’ll bring jobs back to America!And he’s even
a Christian! He’s just what we need in
the White House!"
Baloney.

Monday, March 14, 2016

This discussion between
Cokie Roberts and The Donald on MSNBC news-talk program Morning Joe made Donnie plenty mad.
When asked whether he’s concerned that his rhetoric has inspired white
kids and youth to engage in hate
speech in at least a
handful of widely-reported incidents, he ducked the question. Instead, he angrily dismissed her question as
“nasty.”

Sometime after this incident, a syndicated
op-ed column Cokie and her husband had published about a week earlier,
urging the GOP to do what they can to stop Trump – now, “was brought to NPR’s
attention.”

WTH, NPR?!?
Taking positions on matters of public import is what Commentators DO. It's THEIR JOB. It was once my job (albeit at my college
newspaper’s lofty wage of $0.75 per column inch.) Why on Earth should a COMMENTATOR have to justify her commentary?

These BS maneuvers by NPR reek of "#Trump threatened to sue the HELL out
of us so we're scrambling to limit liability [even though he has NO EFFING
CASE]." Why the hell are they going to such lengths to, well, kinda
humiliate Cokie-freaking-Roberts over no apparent wrong-doing on her part? Don’t they realize that caving only encourages
a bully?!?

But then I settled down some and
decided to tackle the issue with a calmer, more well-reasoned approach. So let’s examine the story’s more troubling
elements one at a time.

Another day, another overheated accusation from the Bernie Sanders campaign and/or the DC operatives loosely affiliated with it that Hillary Clinton is LYING AGAIN. This time, she supposedly LIED about whether Bernie was an active contributor to the 1993-94 health care reform battle.
To hit the point home, “The People for Bernie Sanders” disseminated a little video, essentially accusing Hillary of being a “liar, liar, pants on fire.” They present all of ten seconds of video of Sanders standing in the background on a stage at a Hillary health care reform event, as if that proves their point. (Sanders campaign staff had earlier tweeted out a still from the same CSPAN footage.)

Not trying to be snarky, but Bernie showing up at Hillary's rally at a college next door to his Congressional district wasn't exactly heavy lifting. In the clip, she thanks those who are leaders in the effort, but she doesn’t identify Sanders as one of them. She then says that she was “grateful that Congressman Sanders would join us today from Vermont,” at which point the clip is abruptly cut off.

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Who on Earth buys another company's steaks and tries to pass them off as the
product of his own long-defunct enterprise, because his ego is far too fragile
to EVER admit that some of his business efforts just don’t pan out?

“Trump Steaks. Where are the steaks? Do we have the steaks? Alright. We have Trump Steaks. [Romney] said ‘The steak company!’ And we have Trump Steaks. And by the way, if you wanna take one, we’ll charge you about, what, fifty bucks a steak.”

According
to Yahoo
News and former Trump Steaks purveyor The
Sharper Image, the premium meats brand hasn’t existed since 2007. The meats were also sold through home shopping network QVC that year. That's NINE years ago.

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was slated to come to Washington, DC to address the annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, in two weekends. Netanyahu was also to meet with President Obama while here, a meeting that Israel had sought and The White House had scheduled for March 18.
Now the Prime Minister's Office states that the trip has been cancelled. The White House meeting will not occur, and Netanyahu will speak to AIPAC attendees via satellite.

Plenty assume that Netanyahu's scheduling change has something to do with "frosty" relations between Likud-run Israel and the Obama Administration. Some scoff at the reasoning given by Netanyahu's office. I don't.

I'm reading the scheduling change as Netanyahu avoiding being in the same country as his "good friend" Donald Trump right now.If true, that would make today an even bigger day for Trump and satellites.

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Does this look like a man with a threatening goon squad? / Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0

Some of y’all may have missed it, but Glenn Beck has been hammering
Trump as a fake Republican and urging conservatives to vote elsewhere for
MONTHS.

I don’t want to surprise anyone, but according to Beck, Trump doesn’t seem to
be taking his criticism so well. But now
Beck is alleging some next level stuff.

Here's Glenn Beck, yesterday, intimating that someone affiliated with Donald
Trump threatened a Beck pal a few weeks ago, leaving the man in fear for his
life if he doesn't provide them with some dirt on Glenn.

Friday, March 4, 2016

There were some interesting developments in terms of style and substance at
last night’s GOP debate. But there were also three moments best dealt with on
their own. Two were some absurdities of
a candidate’s own making (guess who?); the other, a case of the Interwebs going
crazy with silliness.
First, there was this: Who needs a massive audience to reassure him that his hands
aren't small at the start of a Presidential debate?! Donald Trump, that's who. In addressing his first question during the live debate, Donald Trump starts flashing around his hands, asking, “Do these look like small hands?” He then assures us, the viewing audience, that “there’s no problem” with the size of “that other body part” – you know, the one said to correlate with a guy's hand and foot size.

Notice that, at first, the crowd is laughing and cheering, and then dissolves
into choruses of boos as the shock wears off among the folks who aren’t die
hard DT fans.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

As of 9:40 PM (Pacific) Saturday night, TheNew York Times reports that the
Nevada Democratic Caucuses went 52.7% for Hillary and 47.2% for Bernie, with
about 5% of precincts left to be accounted for.

Some sources
are still spinning
it as “Hillary eked
out a win.” I don’t know about that –
in most elections, a 5½ point spread is
usually considered a pretty decisive victory.
Sure, Bernie put in a good showing, but Hillary’s victory wasn’t “eked
out.” Not by a long shot.Heck, even Fox News handed it to her - and they seem to have a whole separate bureau specifically dedicated to identifying and promoting each and every story's possible anti-Hillary angles.

Saturday, February 13, 2016

That fine defender of the United States Constitution, Senator Ted Cruz, has spoken. Apparently we owe it to Justice Scalia's memory to ensure that his seat on the Supreme Court remain empty for 11 months or longer.

Okay. Let's say we did that. On close questions, we'd be looking at a lot of 4 to 4 decisions - meaning the Court would be unable to actually issue binding opinions on the most controversial matters that come before it. In legalese, that scenario would reduce the Supreme Court of the United States to a nullity. In plain English, the Supreme Court may as well not exist.I recall Justice Scalia being very, very concerned with The Founders' intent (at least, as he conceived of it.) Am I the only who thinks, hey, maybe The Founders REALLY liked the ideas of three coequal branches of government, which provide checks & balances against one another's power? Am I the only one who recalls those concepts being frequent topics of discussion at the time of our founding?Certainly, a die-hard original intent fan like Senator Cruz recalls these points being repeatedly made within The Federalist Papers. A 4-4 SCOTUS = one branch down, Senator Cruz.

Friday, February 5, 2016

Raw Story is the Democrats’ answer to Breitbart. Anything you see
from them needs to be scrutinized carefully and fact-checked thoroughly. Fail to, and you’ll share, repost, or cite at
your own risk.

Case in point: THIS
Raw Story piece is the WORST. The author, in building a case that pro-Hillary
shenanigans were afoot in the Iowa caucuses, was incredibly sloppy in his
sourcing and analysis. I’m not sure
whether this resulted from his desire to prove his thesis, or the perverse incentives
of “writing at the speed of the Internet” resulting in haphazard work, or both. Just in case it’s primarily due to an unusual
series of mistakes – and we’ve all made them – I’ll simply refer to him here as
RS Travis.

RS Travis cites an Iowa blog for saying the EXACT OPPOSITE of what it says.
He also cites a HuffPo satire piece
as “reporting,” and paints a couple of fairly even-handed Iowa newspaper
editorials as being much more dramatic and sensational than they really were. All in all, lovely. ;)

Misciting a one-year old source

RS Travis:

The blog BleedingHeartland has been raising
concerns that McGuire, who has been involved in Iowa politics for more than 20
years, is manipulating the state’s Democratic Party to favor Clinton over her
challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT).

Uh, that’s
not what she said. The Bleeding Heartland post he linked to
was from one year ago, when McGuire was first elected Chair - the post and all
updates are from January 2015:

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

THIS - college student Sabah Muktar, introducing President Obama's speech at
the Islamic Society of Baltimore moments ago:

"And personally, [President Obama speaking at this mosque]
reassures me that I, a proud, black, Muslim, African-American, am just as
American, and have the obligation to fulfill my loyalty to my country, as any
other."

“Bernie Sanders
is Democrats' Top Beneficiary of Outside Spending, Like It Or Not”*

*This was the original, accurate headline. The NYT later subbed in a misleading, click-bait headline, which I really wish they'd get rid of.*

I'm waiting to hear Sanders supporters - ANY
Sanders supporters - call on Bernie to immediately and publicly repudiate the $5.3
million+ that super PACs have spent so far – much of it in Iowa and New
Hampshire – to help Sanders and hurt
Hillary. At the very least,
denouncing the $4.3
million in right wing attack ads that have been targeting Hillary would
seem to be a gimme.

For the sake of consistency, if Bernie thinks all PACs are bad, he should
probably respectfully request that UNNA not spend their super PAC money trying
to elect him, either. Ditto for myriad
other Bernie-endorsing organizations, including MoveOn.org, which recently
endorsed Bernie, and which spent almost
a million dollars on campaign ads in the 2014 election season (note: MoveOn Political Action is a federal
PAC rather than a super PAC, so they at least disclose their donors.)

Sunday, January 31, 2016

The GOP narrative around Hillary Clinton's State
Department emails got an assist from a seemingly unlikely source on Friday: the
so-called “Mainstream Media,” in the persons of Washington Post reporters Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger,
and Chris Cillizza, who writes WaPo politics
blog, "The Fix.”
Cillizza’s take on the story is, as of this writing, in the WaPo Top 5 most widely read pieces:

Unfortunately, they all read far too much into far too little.Sayeth
Cillizza:

For months, Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign have
stuck to a consistent story line when faced with of classified information on
the private server she used exclusively as secretary of state: She was the
victim of an overzealous intelligence community bent on categorizing
information as top secret or classified when it was, in fact, neither.

That defense hit a major snag on Friday when theState Department announced that it, too, had found
“top secret” information on Clinton’s server — 22 emailsacross seven separate
emails chains. The information, the State Department said, was so secret that
those emails would never be released to the public.Suddenly Clinton’s narrative of an overly aggressive
intelligence community or a broader squabble between the intelligence world and
the State Department didn’t hold water. Or at least held a whole lot less water
than it did prior to Friday afternoon.

Only problem? The State Department said no such thing. Having heard part of the
State Department’s briefing on [conservative] talk radio on Friday, I recalled
it very differently. So I looked it up. Here’s what State
Department Spokesman John Kirby actually said:

I can confirm that as part of this monthly FOIA
production of former Secretary Clinton’s emails, the State Department will be
denying in full seven email chains found in 22 documents, representing 37
pages. The documents are being upgraded
at the request of the Intelligence Community because they contain a category of
top secret information. These documents were not marked classified at the
time that they were sent. We have worked closely with our interagency partners
on this matter, and this dialogue with the interagency is exactly how the
process is supposed to work. As to whether they were classified at the time
they were sent, the State Department, in the FOIA process, is focusing on
whether they need to be classified today. Questions about classification at the
time they were sent are being and will be handled separately by the State
Department. [emphasis added]

Kirby explicitly stated that
the classification upgrade was per request from the Intelligence Community, not
“the State Department itself.” This is
completely consistent with what Secretary Clinton and her campaign have been
saying all along. A few moments later, Kirby
further stated:

These emails denied in full
are among the emails discussed recently by the Intelligence Community inspector
general in a letter to Congress. We will not,
however, be confirming or speaking, as I said, to every detail provided in the
documents or in the ICIG’s letter.One
of these emails was also among those identified by the ICIG last summer as
possibly containing top secret information.[emphasis
added]

To be fair to Cillizza, his analysis
apparently relied on reporting by two of his Washington Post colleagues, who asserted:

The
Friday announcement was significant because it appeared to undercut Clinton’s
argument in recent months that she was merely the victim of a bureaucratic
squabble between overly strict analysts at the intelligence agencies and more
reasonable reviewers at the State Department.

The intelligence community’s inspector general
had previously indicated that he thought that some of the emails contained top
secret material. Until Friday, however, the State Department had declined to
concur with that assessment.

But
this isn’t an accurate reading of Kirby’s comments. In his initial statement and in response to
numerous reporters’ questions on Friday, Kirby
repeatedly reiterated that State had agreed to upgrade the emails in question
at the request of the Intelligence Community. The only slight deviation from this response
came when a reporter asked whether, “you guys [at
State] were prepared to release [these emails] until the intel community came
in and said hey, wait a second, you can’t do that?” To that question, Kirby replied:

No, I
wouldn’t say – I wouldn’t say that, Matt. As I said we had an ongoing
discussion about this traffic with them. At their request we’ve decided to make
this upgrade. It is a State Department decision. We’re doing it, but we’re
doing it at the request of the Intelligence Community. And we’re going to
continue to coordinate and consult with them going forward.

It does seem technically accurate to say that
decisions about whether to release documents in State’s possession pursuant to
a FOIA request is inherently a State Department decision. But folks infinitely more expert on this topic
than I have generally supported Clinton’s contention that some agencies have a
tendency to be overly cautious in making security classification determinations. And predictably,
the overly cautious entity usually wins the day, unless or until the decision
is overruled in an intra-agency MDR review or on appeal to the Interagency
Security Classification Appeals Panel.

The most recent Informational Security Oversight Office report
(at pdf p. 16) indicates that 62% of pages of classified materials challenged by
the public via the MDR process were wholly declassified at the initial review
stage, while an additional 32% of the pages were at least partially
declassified on review. That’s right: 94% of classified pages reviewed under MDR were
wholly or partially declassified in response. Of the much smaller universe of cases that
made it to review
on appeal to ISCAP (at pdf p. 26), 75%
of the 451 documents reviewed by ISCAP were ordered declassified, either wholly
or in part. These data points would
tend to support the contention that some
agencies, at least, have a substantial habit of overclassifying materials.

The National Security Archive, a non-profit based at George
Washington University, provided this
overview of the over-classification phenomenon just a few days ago:

National
Security Archive director Tom Blanton’s July 2015
Washington Post op-ed further lays out the ongoing problem
of overclassification. Blanton argues
that “the real secrets make up only a fraction of the classified universe, and
no secret deserves immortality. In fact, essential to the whole idea of
democratic government is that secret deals with dictators will come out
eventually, not least to deter the worst deals from being made…I showed
Congress the estimates over the years of how much gets classified that doesn’t
deserve to be. Ronald Reagan’s executive secretary for the National Security Council,
Rodney B. McDaniel, said 90 percent.
Thomas H. Kean, the Republican head
of the 9/11 Commission, said 75 percent of what he saw that
was classified should not have been.”

Of lesser import – but still
worth noting – is Cillizza’s contention
that Clinton’s campaign “pivoted”
on the email issue, supposedly in response to the comments from State:

The Clinton team
quickly pivoted. “After a process that has been dominated
by bureaucratic infighting that has too often played out in public view, the
loudest and leakiest participants in this interagency dispute have now
prevailed in blocking any release of these emails,” said campaign spokesman
Brian Fallon.

Calling
for the release of the allegedly top secret emails is a smart gambit by the
Clinton folks since it makes them
look as if they have nothing to hide while being protected by the
near-certainty that the State Department won’t simply change its mind on the
release because the Clinton team asked them to.

This wasn’t any kind of “pivot.” Secretary Clinton has been saying for almost a
full year that she wants the emails released (presumably to the extent that release would not jeopardize national security):

State Department spokesman John Kirby repeatedly reiterated on Friday that State
had upgraded classification of the 22 emails “at the Intelligence Community’s
request.” That sounds like simple interagency
comity. It’s too much of a stretch from
there to declaring that the State Department made some kind of important, revelatory,
independent determination regarding the proper classification.